UNIONS MADE THE DIFFERENCE

Working people made our voices heard in the 2018 midterm elections. Together, we knocked on 2.3 million doors and made a half a million phone calls in support of the labor-endorsed candidates who will advocate for working families.

Saying workers are buffeted by automation, globalization and robotics, which threaten high joblessness, and firms robbing them of bargaining power to fight back and get jobs in the looming new economy, the AFL-CIO launched a year-long study of the state of work and the state of U.S. unions.

Replying to a mandate from last year’s AFL-CIO convention, the new Commission on the Future of Work and Unions met at federation headquarters on May 3, first in a 3-hour morning public session, and then behind closed doors for the rest of the day.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership died because it ultimately failed America’s working families. Instead of addressing the economic devastation wreaked by wrong-headed trade deals, the TPP doubled down on a failed, corporate-driven ideology.

As walkouts by teachers protesting low pay and education funding shortfalls spread across the country, the small but growing movement to recruit teachers from overseas is another sign of the difficulty some districts are having providing the basics to public school students.

Never before has there been so much labor unrest in America’s public schools. Teachers, understandably angry about low pay and harmful cuts in education resources, have organized statewide walkouts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma.

When we fail to invest in public services, living standards decline and communities suffer — overcrowded classrooms, understaffed prisons and more.

But let’s remember what originally made public-sector jobs middle class: labor unions. The right to bargain collectively has allowed millions of public service workers like my father, a Cleveland bus driver and a member of the Amalgamated Transit Union, to live the American dream.

When we kiss our loved ones’ goodbye to head to work, we don’t expect tragedy. Saturday is Workers Memorial Day, a time for all of us to remember those who went to work but unfortunately never returned home because they lost their lives while on the job. It’s also a day to remember that we must keep fighting for safe workplaces and continue to fight short cuts that lawmakers are pursuing as they turn back the clock on health and safety regulations in Congress.

Harvard research and teaching assistants' vote to unionize last week was unique in its scale and drew on a decades-long push to form graduate student unions, according to several labor experts and union organizers.